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Europe Expanded

Europe Expanded II Release Candidate 1 is now available on the VENT forums! https://www.ventdev.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=4379 It expands the expansion into Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, and Ireland, revamps Spain, Portugal, and France, and generally has much more historic detail. Try it today!

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Europe Expanded is a mod for Gear City that expands the Europe Test map, by adding more cities and economic data. The eventual goal is to have a fully playable, immersive map of Europe.

By default, the Europe Test map has 69 cities, which are the same cities that the Base City map has. This map adds 55 new cities across three countries:

- France has 33 cities instead of 7
- Spain has 29 cities instead of 4
- Portugal has 5 cities instead of 1

Although using a city map instead of a territory map, the cities in Europe Expanded represent regions. The city of Calais represents the entire Pas-de-Calais region, for example. Accurate populations for these regions based on 1900 and 2020 census data (or as close as possible) are used, with the number of people living in cities in those regions being used as a proxy for manufacturing and infrastructure. GearCity will interpolate from these values if you start in the middle of this time period.

With these region-focused cities, the population represented in-game relative to the overall country population is relatively high compared to the base game:

- 60% (1900) to 68% (2020) of France's population is represented
- 72% (1900) to 83% (2020) of Spain's population is represented
- 36% (1900) to 79% (2020) of Portugal's population is represented

The higher percentage in 2020 is due to a combination of increasing concentration of populations in large cities over time, and having initially selected regions based on current populations.

Eventually, some additional features such as an expansion of Belgium, adding some more competitors, or setting Elsass-Lothringen to start out as part of Germany and become French in 1918 may be implemented. But it's a lot of work to get historically accurate data and tabulate it into a mod, and I might never finish if I tried to add all the features up front.

*** To Play ***

Subscribe to the mod. You may have to start Gear City to trigger the mod download; if so, exit.

Play Gear City again, but choose the Video Settings Editor option instead of playing the game. Go to the rightmost tab, and select the Europe Expanded mod. Hit the Save button at the bottom of that window, and then exit it.

Play Gear City, and play for real this time. Choose the Europe Test map when you start a new game. Even though it says Europe Test, it will be the expanded version with more cities